Cooler Master HAF Stacker
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
4,366 words · ~21 min read
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by and unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or core i5 processor and get a free copy
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of Rome 2 Total War click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing and overview
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of the affordable liquid coolers wet
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dream get it it's a wet dream cuz it's they're dreaming about liquid cooling
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not sure what you guys thought I was talking about this my friends is the
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half a stacker there's actually two parts I have here today the half stacker
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935 and the half stacker 915f so inside this one we have a
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full-blown miniitx case that can also be
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stacked to this one and inside this one we have two components the 925 which is
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the the sort of the main that's where your ATX chassis is piece as well as
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another 915 but in this case it's a
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915r so unboxing the half Stacker
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935 is a bit of a treat holy cow so huge inside we find
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fairly thick but hard foam ah static
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shock awesome fairly thick hard foam but at least it's on the fairly thick side
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and they put another reinforcement piece
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right here mid package so there's actually three pieces of foam on the
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thing since we took it out upside down the case is of course upside down and
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this will reveal the first
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look at the half stacker all right now
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that we've flipped it over we're going to find a couple of things here so
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number one is that midsection actually goes right in between the two pieces of
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the case that are included with the 935 package so here we find the stacker
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915r in all of its glory and then under
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that okay here we go here's another nice
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thick piece of foam very hearty looking throw that back in the box is the
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925 so you can clearly see this is not really meant necessarily to be its own
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Standalone chassis the top is is is Holy it's full of holes you know holy holy
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holes Batman as Robin would say if that
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show still existed we also have a nice little instruction booklet on how to
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stack which of course refers to the popular pastime of Cups no actually it
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refers to how to stack the half stackers so there's a few different
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configurations they show you half 945 is
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a half 935 which is what you see here plus another half 915 which is what we
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have so that's a main one and two small ones you can put three half 915 that's
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as high as Cooler Master recommends going without additional support or you can do two half 915s or you can just
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have one of these or just one of these and there are lots of different options
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so I think the only way to really tackle a an unusual case like this is in a bit
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of an unusual fashion so we'll start at the bottom where we have okay so there's
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actual rubber grommets right in the bottom of your C what is going what
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Madness is this uh this is the way that you are going to be able to pass through
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cables or water cooling tubes or whatever else you might want into
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potentially a second 9915 that is on the
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bottom of the 925 here so I'm going to show you how you would remove the
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removable feet just like this pull those babies off and then you can turn this
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into a stackable module modular rail
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here so that can be used to stack onto an additional case we've also got a
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removable power supply fan filter right here on the bottom a fairly small one
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but uh no no not too many marks off for that and now let's continue with this
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unorthodox uh chassis here now we're going to go to the right side panel
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where we will find not a whole lot blank side panel all right now we're going to
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go to the top where ah yes see that probably looks familiar now that is that
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same stacking interface nice rugged
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robust plastic considering the price of this case it's actually quite well built
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for my initial Impressions then we can move around to the front of the case
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where we find three 5 and 1/4 in Drive Bays as well as the characteristic full
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honeycomb mesh that we find on stacker cases or rather half cases excuse me
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because it's all about the high air flow also we've got our I/O so we have two
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USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports headphone microphone ports as well as a
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power switch just like that and then on the left hand side panel we find a nice
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tinted window I'm liking that actually it looks quite sharp I'm a bit of a fan
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of the whole tinted window thing I think they look really really good and we're
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going to go ahead and slide that off to reveal the internals of the 925 which we
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will actually get back to so now let's carry on to the
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915r this is the one that comes with the 935 so you get at least two modules now
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this does not have feet on the bottom of it but what it does have is it has a a
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case top piece so you can see the way it's intended to be used out of the box
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is with this one with feet on the bottom on the rails this one with no feet on
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the bottom on the rails and this one stacked on top of this one a little
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something like this just like that you put four screws
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in one two three four on either side and you have yourself one handy dandy
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monstrosity of a massive case here now
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that's not to say that that's the only way you can do it you saw me removing screws from the top of the 950 15 R just
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a second ago and I'm going to just finish doing that and show you guys the
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other option that's available to you so I'm just going to pull out this last
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screw here so feet lids and other cases
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all use the same modular interface so
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that they can be swapped around so there right there is a nice included honeycomb
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ventilation thing as well as a dust filter I meant the included dust filter
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of course a you know a top panel is included with a top panel that's it's
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not really sort of a thing but anyway this gives us our first look inside the
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915r where it now is pretty much empty okay this side panel also has a nice
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included dust filter so you can go ahead and check that out and integrated
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radiator mounting so that leads us to the first real use of these 915 units
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and that is as a dedicated rad box you could actually do two 280 mm radiators
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in push pull or two 360 mm radiators in
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push pull throw those on the side panels here and be pretty much ready to rock so
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the r also comes with three uh 3 and 1/2
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or 2 and 1/2 in Drive mounting points as well as a 5 and a/4 in Drive mounting
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point which you can see through the top up here because that's about the only way we're going to reach it also you can
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see that it has an mitx motherboard tray
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and a power supply Mount at the back and mitx cutout as well as a spot for dual
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slot graphics card so this could be a full mitx system or it could just hold
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radiators or it could just hold drives in fact what you'll notice up here is
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that in addition to these Bays right here there are mounting
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points for two more of them so we could pull the drive cages out of the bottom
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for improved air flow to our graphics cards here throw those up here and put
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all of our drives up in the top routing power to them isn't as much of a problem
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as you might think because you can just use Splitters once you get up there but
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mounting SATA from your motherboard might be a little bit of a challenge the
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good news though is that there are at least four different places where you
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can bring them through so that you can get access to all the different drives
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with all the different SATA cables all right so that leads me to where I was
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heading with my explanation further explanation of the modular interface and
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that is here so if we wanted to we could go you know what I just want like you
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know I just want you know two systems I just want two cases so I'm just going to
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use a 925 on its own and I'm going to use the 9915 as like a bebone skeleton
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I'm going to put like a you know a secondary little storage server in it or
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something you can totally do that right out of the box you can install two
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systems in the one challenge is that this guy does not include the front IO
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by default you can pick that up as an aftermarket option from Cooler Master so
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there is that all right so let's finish up our tour of the internals of the 925
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before we continue to move along here with this very very complicated case all
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right so inside here we find those two 3 and 1/2 in Bays that I mentioned before
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so those can hold either 2 and 1/2 in ssds or 3 and 1 half in drives we also
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have another SSD mount on the back of the motherboard tray you can actually
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see how that's going to be installed there but don't worry we'll take off that other side panel and show that to
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you guys these are fully removable unfortunately these cannot be relocated
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here which would have been quite nice that would have given us some additional options in terms of cable routing and
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all that we have toolless 5 and 1/4 in Baye up here in the top right corner as
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well as a pretty uh actually pretty good
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number of different sort of rubber grommet options the one challenge here
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again is that there's actually less than an inch of space behind here so make
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sure your cable management is tight otherwise you might have a little bit of
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difficulty closing that other side panel all right we've got a bottom mounted
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power supply as well as a 7 plus one configuration for the PCI slot so you
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could install an XL ATX motherboard if you want rather there's an 8+1
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configuration so you could go XL ATX here you could put something like a fan
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controller there in terms of included fans for a half series case I'd say the
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included fans aren't that impressive but we've got a 140 mm at the back and I
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believe there is nothing at the front in this particular one but then there is I
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think it's an 80 mm fan or something like that yeah that's an 80 mm fan in
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the top one so it has options for fan mounting but not a ton of fans included
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but when you consider the price I'd say that's uh that's actually pretty pretty
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reasonable all right so I'll show you guys those fan options that I was trying
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to get at before you just got to pop these tabs out from the inside and you
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can pop the whole front off like that so you can throw a couple more 120 mm fans
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here you'll get better air flow out of these obviously though if you remove
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those Drive caddies and throw them up into the included 915r that is
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definitely going to be my recommended configuration for this case so let's go
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ahead and check out that back panel which I alluded to before but haven't
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actually shown you yet so there's that SSD mount in the middle as well as a
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little bit of room for cable management but again really not as much as I'd like
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uh especially given the way that you're going to want to run cables over here if
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you do Mount your hard drives here but of course you do have the option of
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running up through the top of the case
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and through the bottom of the case depending on where you keep your stuff in fact I think probably my recommended
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configuration out of the box if you're not liquid cooling would be take all
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your hard drives Chuck them down below run everything down here and then down
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here from your power supply and then have nice open air flow for your for
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your gaming system component all right so this is the 915f this is the one
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that's available as an aftermarket option you can see that it comes
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with both a top piece and with feet so
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that means it can be used as a standalone case unlike the other two
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which do not come with all the pieces that you'd actually need to use them
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each individually and it also has a bit of a a bit of a smarter layout in terms
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of if you were to use it as a standalone case so rather than you know having a
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bunch of mounts for 3 and 1/2 in drives
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for example where it's it's really just meant to be overflow space for radiators
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and drives or whatever else for a different case it has its Drive mounts
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kind of spread around and then it has a configuration that allows for a bit of a
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a bigger CPU Cooler for example U the
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915r that's included oh it has the same radiator mounts though so you could
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still just use it as a rad box throw radiators on the side so you can see
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here in the included one the r your power supply goes at the back that's
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what the r is for rearm mounted power supply and there's really not much clearance for a CPU Cooler here so you
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could install a full system in there but it's really not intended for you to to do that whereas this one the power
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supply actually goes way over here in the front so they have a removable dust
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filter right here below it and then you've got your exhaust out the front of
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the case right up here and then you've got an extension cable that runs to your
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power supply from the back of the case so that you don't have to plug your
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power your power directly into the front of your case you've also got a 5 and a/4
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inch Bay up here that includes on the bottom here hopefully I can get you guys
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a good angle of that 3 and 1/2 in and 2 and 1/2 in mounting holes you have
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another set of 3 and 1/2 in and 2 half inch mounting holes down here on the
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bottom and then you have a third set here on this cross brace so you can put
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a total of 3 3 and 1/2 in or three 2 and 1 12 in drives or of course if you
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install an optical drive then you will you'll be missing that option what we also find here is that optional
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accessory that's available for the other one with front IO so USB 3 Audio as well
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as a power switch now airflow inside
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this guy isn't really that optimal it was more of an afterthought you know hey
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why don't we make this available as a standalone case as well as as an upgrade
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module to the half stacker because it's really not necessarily the best ITX case
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in the world it just happens to be a part of what is the biggest most
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versatile liquid cooling Andor storage case for gamers that's pretty much out
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there so you've got more rubber grommets for I just knocked that one out oops
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more rubber grommets for pass through as well as some other things for pass through and then ah yes those same
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mounting holes so we could put three 3
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and 1/2 in cages in here and run an additional nine drives out of this one
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as well as in the other one so there it is guys that is what Cooler Master
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internally refers to as the half stacker
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945 a 915r a
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915f and a 925 many of these parts modular these
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side panels can be moved around you can see we actually ended up with some extr
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modular Parts when we assembled the case we've got two extra sets of feed and an
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extra top so if we bought another 925 we could get a full additional ITX case and
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a full additional ATX case out of the deal so that's that's actually something
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to consider that's one large case and then one medium and one small case for
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what would effectively be um I guess
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just around $450 or $500 or something
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like that that's not bad so I'm going to spend probably the rest of this video
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I'm going to take these apart again and talk about the possibilities of of
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building in here some of what Cooler Master thinks people might do with it
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and some then some of what I realistically think people actually might do with it because frankly some of
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their ideas are not very good um one of the ideas they had was oh you could use
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it for um cryptocoin Mining and I'm like
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well no because you wouldn't use a miniitx system for cryptocoin mining
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because you could only have one GPU in it and particularly if you're mining
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litecoins then you're going to need lots of gpus and then even if you're mining
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bitcoins you're going to need uh dedicated folding cards anyway and so
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you'll need PCI expansion slots and it doesn't really have that but where I see
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this being useful is more like um I thought one interesting scenario was
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render farm so if you wanted to have your your render your rendering offload
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machine actually like strapped to your main video editing PC um another
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interesting use case scenario that I see is lots of storage if you really want a
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ton of storage in your PC you could actually run three cages here three
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cages here so that would be a total of 18 drives between these two you could
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run another six here which would be a total of 24 drives and all of that would
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fit in a chassis that all these pieces combined is less than $250 so you know
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you could look at it and you go oh well you could get like a Norco 24 Bay you
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know 4 U case for that money it would take up less space but you would be
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paying a lot more for it that's about $500 also the 3 and 1 half in Drive
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sleds are quite excellent so you just release the clip on the back Pull It
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Wide and then without doing any bending like we've seen in a lot of recent Drive
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sleds it's also quite solid you can go ahead attach your drive and then slide
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that in and it feels good even without a drive installed in it and I think Cooler
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Master was actually the first one to uh to implement the whole super flimsy
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Drive cages but that are really firm once you get a drive in them but now
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they've gone away from that anyway um another scenario that I see people using
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this for is very extreme liquid cooling so being able to put dual 360s up here
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dual 360s down here in the bottom run all your tubing in between using all
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these convenient holes where you can actually it's like it feels like a magic
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trick right it's like oh I put my hand in this computer it comes out in this computer holy crap um being able to put
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that much liquid cooling horsepower into something that costs again about $250
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where comparably if you wanted something that fits you know four radiators you'd
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be looking at something from Mountain mods where it's a a cube case and some
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people will like the height here where instead of having to compromise that
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much of your floor space or that much of your Des desk space you can have it be
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vertically stacked get it stacked stacker um and have it take up at least
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as much square footage of the actual space that it sits on so being able to
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fit a ton of liquid cooling into something this inexpensive and that
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takes up this much this little floor space is quite impressive as well one of
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the other things they talk about is having your uh having a dedicated game
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server so if you land a lot for example you could have a dedicated game server
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machine sitting up here on a little mini ITX board also throw some extra 3 and a
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half inch expansion out there you know take one of these out get some extra air
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flow to your graphics card that's a very realistic one um having you know an
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alternate gaming rig well your main one is editing I didn't think was that
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realistic because I thought my way the other way around would be better because
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then you don't necessarily have a full-blown gaming GPU up here that just
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sits there doing nothing most of the time so in conclusion this really isn't
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my cup of tea if you guys have been following me for any period of time I
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mean I kind of looked at this when Cooler Master unveiled it at packs and I
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kind of went okay for the six people who
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are interested in that fine but I didn't really get a chance to look at it that
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closely and I didn't really get to examine the overall build quality of it
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that much at the time um and now I think I understand it a little bit better it's
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still not for me I prefer more like um
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clean lines and and plain a plain aesthetic whereas half has never really
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been about that it's been about an edgy outward appearance and air flow Above
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All Else Cooling and and flexibility and then the the stacker of DNA comes in
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here with well stacking and lots and lots of hardware and it's just it's not
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for me I prefer having an off loed raid
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box that sits in another room and I don't have to look at or listen to but I
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definitely see the value so for people looking for that value oriented water
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cooling case or that value oriented storage optimized case this really is
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pretty much as good as it gets for either of those things it's also built
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better than I thought the one that I saw was pre-production and it really wasn't
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that impressive this one is quite solid I would feel confident even once it's
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full of Hardware having three full systems in here which you could actually
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do and while i' probably want it against a desk or something on one side it's
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really not that bad and I'm extremely impressed um I think that's pretty much
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it oh yeah real user reviews I have the benefit now of reading reviews from
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people who actually own the thing and paid their own money for it and they're
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all extremely positive so I think the people who know they want this guys just
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buy it you're going to be happy with it for the people who know that this is not
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for them like me well guys you're probably not going to be happy with it
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so don't force yourself one last thing that I thought I'd include since this is
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hilarious is in this configuration has support for three full power supplies so
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you could put one down here at the front you could put one here in the middle on
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the bottom of the middle one and you could put one up here in the top so if you did want to use the middle tower for
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example for Litecoin mining then at least you'd have all the power that you
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needed you could split it across three different power supplies thank you for
19:54
checking out my unboxing and overview of The Cooler Master Half Stack
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don't forget to subscribe to L Tech chps more unboxings reviews and other computer videos like this video if you
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liked it dislike it if you disliked it and let me know in the comments are you
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a stacker person or are you not a stacker person because I think there's
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only two kinds of people in this world stacker people and not stacker people
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a